Helping Camel Jockeys

Many countries, including the United States, have outlawed the employment of children. But unfortunately it is more common today than ever.

An estimated 218 million children ages 5 to17 go to work each day around the world, 171 million in hazardous occupations, and 8.4 million in bondage, armed conflicts, trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation, according to the International Labor Organization's 2006 report.

The simple reason that children end up in rug factories or rock quarries instead of classrooms is poverty.

Many parents simply give their sons and daughters away, or sell them, in the mistaken hope that they will be better fed and maybe even have a chance to go to school or send money back home. But too often, the children end up in involuntary servitude or debt bondage, knotting rugs for 20 hours a day or doing domestic work for families who do not pay or value them. Some of the most abhorrent forms of child labor include recruiting children as soldiers in armed conflicts, including those in Africa and Burma.

Most child laborers live in parts of the world where people are struggling to survive on less than $2 a day. One child in three works in Africa and one child in five works in Latin America, according to UNICEF, the U.N.'s children's agency.

But this is not just a developing world problem. Child labor also exists in the United States, mostly among children of migrant workers who work in the fields alongside their parents. There is a large gap between regular labor laws and agricultural statutes. For example, Illinois allows 12-year-olds to work in agriculture, while Hawaii allows 10-year-olds and Oregon lets 9-year-olds pick berries. There is also no limit to the number of hours U.S children can work in agriculture, according to the ILO.

The political will to enforce child labor laws often does not exist in the face of crushing economic hardship. Child labor is both a symptom and a cause of poverty because it depresses wages throughout an economy while robbing children of their opportunity to get an education and be more successful wage earners than their parents.

There are few "success stories" to report in the world's fight to end child labor. Any real solution must focus on lifting families and communities out of poverty, increasing the quality and availability of free education, providing social safety nets to help in times of natural disasters or family health crises, and enforcing the laws that punish those who take advantage of weak and defenseless children.

Relief organizations routinely rescue a very small percentage of children from factories and farms and send them back to their villages. They have established programs to educate the children and their families, hoping to dissuade parents from sending their children away. But this is obviously not a comprehensive solution or a way to end the cycle of poverty.

The UAE, the U.S. and other governments have also pushed to increase the penalties for trafficking in women and children. In 2007, the UAE passed the strongest anti-human trafficking law in the region. Although it is also important to remove the demand for items produced by child laborers, only about 5% of them actually produce goods for export.

The UAE and UNICEF's comprehensive international effort to end the use of children employed as camel jockeys is one of the few bright spots because it has both removed the demand for the child workers and focused on ways to empower the former jockeys in their home countries.

Starting in 2005, robot jockeys replaced children on camels and trafficking was halted by tightening border controls, including a crackdown on passport fraud. Once the children returned home they were not simply dumped back in their homes and given money. That would have worsened the problem by encouraging other parents to try playing the "lottery" of child labor. Instead, the former child jockeys receive trust funds, education and training that will give them the skills they need to help themselves, their families and perhaps their whole community break out of the cycle of crushing poverty that is at the root of the problem.

Similarly, RugMark is a nonprofit group in Washington that has addressed child labor in the rug industries of Pakistan, India and Nepal by certifying that its rugs are child-labor free. With UNICEF's help, it has also helped more than 3,000 child laborers since 1994 by providing vocational and educational training so that they too can escape poverty.

The number of children working in Latin America has been cut by more than half---from 15.7 million to 7.4 million-in the first half of this decade with the help of programs that provide small stipends to low-income families in Mexico and Brazil.

On December 18, 2007, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution called "Rights of the Child" that calls upon member states to immediately eliminate the worst forms of child labor and to promote education, vocational programs and other opportunities to better integrate these children into society.

In addition to the UAE and other governments, many other non-governmental organizations have focused on eliminating child labor. They include Christian Children's Fund and Free the Children.